


Post-Processing

by madwriteson



Series: Wolf 359 Post-canon [3]
Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: And learning to cope with the fact that your friend isn't who he was, Because they all have some steam to blow off, Memory Loss, Post-Canon, also shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-16
Updated: 2019-11-16
Packaged: 2021-01-31 14:55:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21448042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madwriteson/pseuds/madwriteson
Summary: A selection of scenes from the crew's trip home on the Urania, from Renée Minkowski's point of view, mostly focused on getting to know who the new Doug Eiffel is as he tries to figure it out himself.
Relationships: Doug Eiffel & Renée Minkowski
Series: Wolf 359 Post-canon [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1232834
Comments: 4
Kudos: 41
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Post-Processing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [raven (singlecrow)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/singlecrow/gifts).

_October 23rd, 2016_

A sublight arc, while faster than inching your way across the universe the way humanity once had, lightyear by grueling lightyear, still took more than two months to get from Wolf 359 to Earth. In this case, it would likely take closer to three; given the general condition of the Urania after those last few, frantic days they’d spent orbiting the star, they were lucky that it would get them home at all.

Some days it felt like forever to Renée Minkowski.

Some days she didn't think it would be long enough for all that needed to be done.

It had started with Isabel. She’d gone digging through the databases aboard the Urania, looking at the files Kepler had brought with him, ostensibly trying to find dirt they could use against Goddard but actually spending most of her time searching desperately for information about Alexander Hilbert. Why, Renée didn't know, other than as a way for Isabel to hurt herself with, until one day Isabel confessed that she had been searching for some sign that there was something human left in the man. Some sign that he truly had been her friend, once, even if he had set that aside to do what he had done.

Renée had comforted her the best she could, but in truth she thought that they would probably never know the truth of that man.

Jacobi—Daniel, Renée tried to remember to call the man, but the pair of them still circled each other cautiously when they were in the same room—seemed to be doing something similar with the files involving Warren Kepler. Searching, and digging, and trying to find the human heart in Goddard's cold archives. And Miranda Pryce was doing research of her own, both more and less personal. Her mechanical miracle of a body was utterly indecipherable to them all, and she wanted to know how to enact repairs if it broke down, a task which, given the fact that there weren’t exactly spare parts aboard the Urania, had some level of urgency to it, especially since her eyes had gone on the fritz a few days into their journey.

And Doug...

Doug was trying to find himself.

All of his old audio logs were aboard the Urania, but he seemed to find the person he had been as indecipherable as Renée often had. And while the entertainment system aboard the Urania was a little more robust than a single video cassette of Home Alone 2, it couldn’t provide the same context to Doug’s recorded words that a lifetime of absorbing pop culture obviously had. He could only guess at the meaning of a lot of his more cryptic references.

“I guess when you get back to Earth, you can go on an epic binge fest,” Renée said one day when he was complaining—albeit somewhat comedically—that he had no idea what past Doug was talking about in one of the recordings.

Doug’s face went serious at that. “I’m not sure I really want to,” he confessed. “I mean… he—I was kind of an asshole, wasn’t I? What if all that—that stuff is why?”

“You were getting better,” Renée was quick to assure him. A meaningless platitude to the Doug who was in front of her, but one she felt obligated to give.

“If you say so,” Doug said dubiously.

“You had your moments.”

Doug let out a self-deprecating crack of laughter. “I don’t know that there would have been any moments good enough to make up for this,” he said, hitting play on an audio file from day 455 of their mission. “I did this over toothpaste?”

Renée was startled by an unexpected burst of laughter from her own mouth.

_November 7th, 2016_

They were halfway through their journey now, and Renée hadn’t seen Doug for a couple of days. The Urania was just large enough that it wasn’t too worrying, especially as the shift rotation they had set up meant that the two of them had been on opposite shifts for the past week, but long habit still had her hunting him down late in the afternoon, some part of her certain he was up to some mischief. He wouldn’t be, of course; this new Doug never was.

Well, almost never.

She found him tucked into a nook with a tablet stuck to the wall in front of his face. He was staring intently at some video on the screen and making strange—and strangely fluid—motions with his hands.

“What are you doing?”

Doug looked up, startled. “Teaching myself sign language.” He fumbled for the pause button on the screen. “Well, re-teaching myself, I think. It’s like there’s muscle memory for it, even if my brain thinks it’s all new knowledge.”

Renee felt a jerk of some strong emotion, halfway between amusement and remorse. Of course he would want to learn sign language. There might have been plenty of information about Doug in the Urania databanks, but information about his daughter—other than that she existed—was pretty light on the ground, which meant that if he wanted to reach out to Anne when they got back... Renée shoved the amusement to the forefront of her mind and forced out a little laugh. “Knowing you knew sign language would have been useful back when we were trying to break into the Sol.”

Doug had heard plenty of stories of their time aboard the Hephaestus from everyone by now, from the good times to the bad to the worse, that nightmarish trip across the hull of the Hephaestus and into enemy territory among them. Renée’s statement had him raising a dubious eyebrow. “Do _you_ know sign language?”

“Not a bit.”

Doug let out a little snort of laughter of his own and shook his head. “So maybe not _that_ useful.”

“Maybe not.” Renée chuckled, a real laugh this time.

He looked back up at her anxiously. “Want to learn with me? I could use someone to practice with, and Hera doesn’t exactly have hands.”

Renée felt a painful, reluctant smile spread across her face. “I’d like that.”

“Cool. I’ll have Hera download the videos to another tablet?”

“Sounds good.”

_November 18th, 2016_

“Why’d you try and send me back on my own?”

“Sorry?” Renée looked up from where she was sorting through a pile of cables, trying to find the dead one. She had asked for a volunteer to help her with some maintenance at breakfast that morning, and Doug had, surprisingly, thrown his hat in the ring before anyone else could. And now that they were at work, he had volunteered to take on the remarkably stubborn bolts that were holding the access panel they needed to get behind in place, saying that he felt like throwing himself at a different pointless task than the usual.

“It’s just, sure, I have a daughter, but it’s not like... well, I don’t even know if we’re on speaking terms. But you’re _married_.” Doug wrenched the third bolt free, securing it to a magnet on the wall before attaching the wrench to the fourth bolt and yanking, letting out a grunt of frustration when it didn’t move at all.

“I was married when I left. Now...”

“How long does it take for someone to be declared dead, anyway?” Doug braced himself against a handhold and threw himself at the wrench again, and this time the wrench moved half an inch, the bolt it was attached to loosening incrementally.

“Longer than we were gone.” Renée sighed, and tried to concentrate on the wire bundle in front of her.

“So wouldn’t you still be married?” Doug flung himself at the wrench again, cheering when the bolt wrenched free of the thick plating it had been holding in place. Renée set the wires she had been working on aside and crossed the room to help Doug slip the plating into the brackets that would keep it from floating around the room while they dug through the wiring behind it.

“They reported our deaths.”

Doug wiped a greasy hand across his forehead. “And your husband wouldn’t have waited?”

“No.”

“What an asshole.”

“It’s not like that,” Renée protested.

“Huh.” Doug dove headfirst into the opening in the wall before Renée could offer to go herself, and then reached back out. “Hand me that tablet? I had Hera load all the specs for this section onto it.”

Renée grabbed the tablet from where it was velcroed to the wall and put it in Doug’s hand. “Here.”

“Thanks.” Doug pulled the tablet into the wall with him, and she heard the little rip of him tearing off a strip of duct tape so he could secure the tablet temporarily inside the wall. “You want to tell me what it _is_ like, then, if it’s not like that?”

Renée hesitated.

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

“I want to,” she blurted out, suddenly realizing just how much she had wanted someone to talk to about this. Hera didn’t understand, Miranda didn’t care, Daniel was a bad choice in every possible way, and Isabel... well. Isabel was a maybe, in every way, and that was part of the problem. Hard to talk to the woman you were kind of sort of in love with about the man who was still technically your husband... and who you still loved just as much as you had the day you left earth.

“He’s a reporter,” Renée said, and where once she might have gotten a sarcastic answer about how yes, of course he remembered that from Doug, he just acknowledged what she’d said with an incoherent noise of affirmation and a nod that was half visible from where she was clinging to a railing nearby the hole in the wall.

“Sometimes—not often, you know, but from time to time, he gets—got—sent into situations that were violent.” Renée swallowed hard, a lump caught in her throat. “And I’ve been in the air force since we met, so at one point we promised each other...” she trailed off, hurting too much to finish the sentence right away. After a long, quiet moment where the only sounds were from Doug rummaging around inside the wall, she found her voice again. “We promised that if one of us died, the other one wouldn’t... wouldn’t wait. That we’d move on and find someone new. Find... find happiness.”

“I get that,” Doug said, pulling his head back out of the wall and frowning at her. “I just feel like there ought to be an exemption for ‘turns out I was working for an evil multinational corporation that decided to fake my death.’”

“Well it’s not like he knows the difference on his end.”

“That why you still haven’t called him?” Doug asked, head buried in the wall’s innards once more.

“That, and…” Renée sighed, grateful that these repairs had necessitated them shutting off Hera’s access to this room, leaving the AI with no way to eavesdrop. “It’s Isabel.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah.”

“You really like her.”

An understatement, in every way. “Yeah.”

“But you haven’t done anything about that yet, either.”

“Yeah.”

“Because you don’t know about your husband. Because you haven’t called him.” Doug emerged from the wall again and raised an eyebrow at her. “How can you be such a good commander and be so terrible at relationships?”

“If I knew, I wouldn’t be in this mess.” Renée rubbed her free hand over her face and groaned. “Anyway, it’s not like I’m that good a commander.”

“You managed to keep me alive this far. That seems pretty good to me.”

“Like that’s an achievement.”

“How many times did I almost die?”

“Only a few.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Okay, so maybe a few dozen…”

“That sounds more like it.” Doug grinned at her. “Get me a screwdriver?”

“Sure.” Renée pulled the tool out of its slot in the toolbox and handed it over. “Need a hand?”

Doug waved her off as he stuck his head back into the hole in the wall. “I’m good. I’ll give you a shout if I do.”

Renée went back to her cables with a smile on her face.

_November 24, 2016_

“So, what do you think?” Renée asked Doug and Isabel, who had just rejoined her in the Urania’s mess, the results of their raids on the ship’s storage compartments at hand. “We got what it takes to put together a Thanksgiving dinner?”

“Well, it’ll be a little unorthodox,” Isabel said, staring dubiously down at the packages of heat-stabilized turkey stroganoff she’d just shoved into the bungee-fronted box they were using to contain their spoils. “But it’ll certainly have _something_ resembling all the component parts.”

“You’ve got to be kidding about this cranberry sauce thing, though,” Doug said, holding up a can and eying it dubiously.

“Oh, no,” Isabel said, straight-faced.

“The cranberry sauce is _vital_,” Renée added.

Both of them dissolved into giggles a moment later at Doug’s disgusted expression.

“Not really my favorite,” Renée said, “but it’s traditional. I think some people might even like it?”

“Not me,” Isabel said, sticking her tongue out and shaking her head. “But probably someone. Somewhere.”

Daniel went drifting through the mess, clearly taking it as a shortcut from one location to another… and then immediately bounced off the door frame, backtracking. “What are you guys doing?”

“It’s Thanksgiving,” Isabel explained, still more at ease with Daniel than Renée was. “We’re putting together a meal.”

“I’m not sure the stores are up to a proper Thanksgiving dinner,” he said, sounding as if he were doing a mental inventory. “Am I invited?”

Renée nodded. “Of course.” She still didn’t particularly care for Daniel, but… sometimes she liked to feed people. Especially on holidays. She jiggled the box. “I think we’ve got most of the traditional fixings, or at least a reasonable approximation of them, but if you’ve got any suggestions…”

“Daniel. Please.” Doug grabbed him by the shoulder and looked at him wide-eyed. “Please tell me that cranberry sauce is _not_ a traditional part of Thanksgiving.”

Daniel’s eyebrows shot up for a moment in transparent surprise. “No-ooo,” he said thoughtfully. “Well, I mean, yes, it is. And you know what, I _do_ have some ideas for additions to the meal.” He bumped his own hand companionably against Doug’s shoulder. “Come on, I could use a hand sorting through the stores.”

“Okay…” Doug followed Daniel out of the room, asking “Hera, report on the status of cranberry sauce as a traditional Thanksgiving dish?” as he went.

“I’m afraid that I have to report that cranberry sauce is indeed a traditional Thanksgiving dish,” Hera said in response, sounding as if she were trying to repress some strong emotion.

Renée and Isabel collapsed into helpless giggles once again after Doug and Daniel were gone, joined by Hera this time.

“Oh, he’s going to try and convince Doug that something _real_ weird is part of a traditional Thanksgiving meal, isn’t he,” Isabel said through her laughter.

“Absolutely,” Renée responding, wheezing. “Hera, keep us posted?”

“Will do, commander!”

Later that evening, they all gathered around the dinner table, packets of turkey stroganoff and heat-stabilized mashed potatoes and freeze-dried green bean chips at hand, along with a little tube of gravy to squeeze onto things. There was also a pile of tortillas, still in the bag they’d been packaged in, that everyone was pretending were almost like rolls… and everyone had a plate taped to the table in front of them with slices of the cranberry sauce adhered in place under the force of their own peculiar stickiness.

“Why. Why does it jiggle?” Doug poked his slab of cranberry sauce with a fork.

“It’s cranberry sauce,” Isabel responded, as if that explained everything.

“Pardon me if I’m somehow misunderstanding, y’know, everything I’ve re-learned about food products up to this point, but it’s my understanding that sauces are supposed to be kind of liquidy. And this is definitely not liquidy!”

“Eat your goddamn cranberry sauce, Doug.”

“I mean is this because the can expired 20 years ago? Was this once a liquid? Has it undergone a terrible can alchemy that turned it into whatever this is?”

“EAT. YOUR. CRANBERRY. SAUCE.”

Across the table, Miranda transferred a forkful of the stuff awkwardly from plate to mouth, and immediately made a face and spat it out into her napkin. “That is not edible,” she said. “And I think I’m done.”

“Aw, come on, and I haven’t even brought out the traditional Thanksgiving chicken feet!” Jacobi protested as Miranda abandoned the mess.

Doug blanched in horror, and Renée and Isabel dissolved into laughter once more.

“Whoo. Okay. Let’s get back to the edible food, huh?” Isabel wiped her eyes on a napkin—well, on one of the pieces of paper towel they were using as napkins—and snatched up the tube of gravy, squeezing a bit out onto the corner of a tortilla and taking a bite. She made a face. “Well, for a given definition of edible. This gravy is, uh...”

“You know who made good gravy?” Renée claimed the tube for herself and squirted some directly into her packet of potatoes before squishing it around to mix it up.

“Oh, god, I hate to say it, but Selberg. Selberg made really damn good gravy,” Isabel said with a sigh. “That man.”

“I don’t know what he put in it, and I probably don’t want to. But it was...”

“I know, right?”

Daniel was looking uncomfortable and Doug was looking lost. Renée cleared her throat and changed the subject. “Anyway, since most of us are here, might as well give you an update on our sublight trajectory. It looks like we’ll be getting home in another month, give or take a day or two. Just in time for Christmas.”

“And Doug’s birthday,” Hera chimed in.

Renée smiled. “And Doug’s birthday.”

_December 25th, 2016_

They would be entering Earth’s orbit some time in the next few hours. All of them had been restless for the past few days, and full of petty disagreements; it had been easy enough to set their differences aside and pretend the things that annoyed them about each other didn’t matter when they knew they still had weeks left in their journey, but now that the end was in sight… well. Renée was ready to scream.

Doug, surprisingly, was the only one who _wasn’t_ getting on Renée’s nerves for once. Right now, he was manning the comms panel on the tiny, cramped bridge of the Urania with an ease that seemed to be surprising even to him, tracking messages about local space traffic and relaying the relevant course corrections to Renée.

“You sure this is how you want to spend your birthday?” Renée asked during a moment of down time. “I could get Isabel to take over if you’d rather spend the day on leisure.”

“It’s not like I even remember what a birthday is like. And after all, this _is_ my job.” Doug frowned and pressed his headphones to his ear. “Copy that, Control, we’re adjusting our course.” He passed the coordinates on to Renée and she adjusted their trajectory minutely. Between satellites, the five space stations that currently orbited Earth (two of which were dockyards, where new construction of anything heading out of Earth’s orbit generally took place these days), and all the other incoming and outgoing traffic, making sure they weren’t going to collide with anything on this final approach was a delicate procedure. One Renée preferred to handle herself instead of trusting it entirely to Hera.

“Hey, are we there yet?” Daniel stuck his head into the bridge.

“You know we’re not!” Renée snapped. “I would have had Hera announce it if we were.”

Daniel squeezed in behind them and dangled his arms over the backs of their flight chairs. “So when are we going to get there?”

“I don’t know, _Daniel,_” Renée snapped, brushing Daniel’s arm off her chair.

Doug tapped her on the shoulder. _Commander, calm down_, he signed.

Renée let out a sigh and forced her shoulders to relax, signing back a brief _Sorry._

“What was that?” Daniel asked, having obviously noticed the wordless exchange.

“Sign language.” Doug shot Daniel a sardonic look. “Isn’t that the sort of thing super sexy high-end intelligence agents are supposed to know?”

“Yeah, sure,” Daniel said, rolling his eyes. “Here’s a bit of sign language for you.” He flipped Doug off and pushed off the back of Doug’s chair, slipping back out the hatch to the hallway, shouting “Let me know when we get there!” into the bridge behind him.

Doug frowned, obviously listening intently to his headphones again, and relayed another course adjustment.

“So…” Renée said once the adjustment was made. “Something happening there?”

“Something happening?” Doug asked, sounding distracted.

Renée waited a moment to make sure he wasn’t receiving another message from control before continuing. “With you and Daniel. Romantic-wise.” She paused, and considered. “Or sex-wise, I suppose, though I don’t know if you tend towards one without the other.”

Doug groaned. “Oh, god no. I’m not…” He trailed off. “I think it’s going to be a while before I have room for other people as anything but friends. Not that I really know what being friends is like.”

There was a tense silence in the bridge suddenly, one that Doug was the first to break.

“You… you’re my friend, right?”

Renée felt tears spring to her eyes and wiped them hastily away with the back of her sleeve before they could obscure her vision. “Yes. Yes, Doug, I’m always going to be your friend.”

“Good.” Doug grinned. “Now, let’s see if we can get this bucket of bolts home in one piece, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

**Author's Note:**

> (let's be honest, a lot of this was just me writing the same post-canon versions of Eiffel and Minkowski that I'm writing in [A Whole New World](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20724503/chapters/49235798), minus the extra self-indulgent aspects of that fic.)


End file.
